In late 2007 a friend of mine convinced me to head over to EB with him, and indulge in the purchase of a new MMO. Sort of MMO. An MMO in the sense that it was supposed to be massive, it is multiplayer, and it is online, but more in the way the Diablo is an MMO. Did that make any sense? It did inside my brain! This game is purely instances, and the only place you can interact with people is through the chat functions, or in the main "cities".
I was fairly excited, I was intrigued to play a fast paced FPS/Third person melee with action-RPG elements. IE, hordes of baddies vs not very many players. What I got was one of the most broken games I've ever actually spent money on. I mean, I would have been upset if this was a BETA. The party functions were broken, enemies were glitching, the quests were bugged, and there was one point in the main quest where you could NOT continue because the quest triggers were incorrect. The classes were imbalanced, talents were broken, and many of the talents made little to no sense. So, after struggling through approximately fifteen playtime hours and beating the game on the first difficulty, we put the game in a dark corner to think about what it had done to us. I'm glad I didn't spend any money on a subscription for it.
And here I am, dusting it off again for the first time since then. I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Many MMOs look nothing now like they did in 1.0, so what the hay right? It's now in 1.45 and they've had plenty of time to clean their act up, so I went balls to the walls straight away and subscribed. What I got now was a completely different experience from the first time. Quests were smooth, (most) enemies were de-glitched. The party functions actually worked correctly inside the instances. A few of the classes have even been overhauled, and they are continuing to do so. They seem to have hauled ass to fix many of the errors that stopped the game from being enjoyable. So, now I can sit here and properly review the game, now that it is actually a game.
I'm going to come straight out now and say that to me, the melee classes in this game are terribly boring to play. They are exciting for about an hour, but there is no combo building, or any sort of strategy really. It just doesn't feel natural and fast paced. You run in, use the same skills every time in the same order, and you can pretty much just play with one hand while you use the other to keep your scrotum warm on those snowy Canadian winter days. As of now, there is a tanking-ish melee class, and a dual wielding beserker style hack and slasher. While the tanking class is very effective at that job (now that they fixed taunting) it is incredibly boring to play. I have to staple my eyeballs open while I just taunt, then smash them with my sheild, then taunt again, etc. Sounds exciting, but most of the benefits of this class come from passive auras that you have no control over. The blademaster (barbarian) was a little more interesting to play, and the talent trees gave you a few different options for build and playstyle, but it was still ultimately button mashing. This game is definately running off of the theory "You only have to make 10 minutes of gameplay and then repeat, it, so that 10 minutes has to be fun". Melee, was not fun.
Ranged is where this game shines. There are two pure ranged classes, the Marksman and the Evoker. The Evoker is essentially a mage, and the Marksman is Master Chief. Since the idea is to stay far away, advancing melee NPCs force you to strategize and move constantly to stay alive on the harder difficulties. To me, this is far more interesting and more importantly, intensly fun. In the endgame content, you are rarely sitting comfortable in your chair when playing these classes. My back usually hurts after two hours from hunching over my keyboard with my abs flexed. My fingers spider all over the hotkeys and movement controls like I'm playing Slayer on GH3.
There are also two "pet classes". The engineer and the Summoner. They are essentially watered down versions of their "pure" counterparts (Marksman -> Engineer and Evoker -> Summoner), only retaining a few of the skills and the rest are replaced with summoning talents. They have the usual, tanking pet, damage pets, pets that put debuffs on the enemies. I personally didn't find them that fun to play, but they were not boring. Just not as intense since your posse does most of the work for you.
Enough about this, lets talk about some of the other mechanics. They had some real geniuses working on this game, and as many shortcomings as it has, it also has a few brilliant concepts. When you are in a party, and you are killing enemies, everyone gets their own loot. Get that? Everyone has their own loot (but also not identical to the other party members). This removes one of my major gripes about some multiplayer games, spending hours on an instance or boss, just to lose a great item to someone else. You can also dismantle loot, and use the components to upgrade your items, or craft new items entirely. The special effects in this games, such as getting set on fire and shocked with electricity, are very complex and it adds another layer of strategy when fighting enemies. For example, if you are fighting a particular mob that has a nasty move, you can use electric weapons or talents to try and bypass his elemental defense and "shock" him, which prevents him from using special talents. This forces the player to carry many weapon setups for different situations, and change talents to adjust the strength and length of these "special effects". Get it? Got it? Good!
I almost forgot to mention this. It is almost impossible to look like anyone else in the game. There is some sort of random generator that adds all your gears' looks together, and gives you a unique color and texture. For example, in my gear right now I am wearing white armour with a dark orange undersuit. If I change my pants, I will go to a gunmetal armour color with a blue undersuit and a lighting system on the back of my nanosuit. Neat? Yes.
Now onto the level design. For the first half of the game, there is literally just three or four layouts for levels. One of the big points they talked about with this game was the random level generation in instances. Unfortunately, they spent so much time doing this that until you get further into additional content, you are pretty much stuck with these levels: Random subway system, random city street, and random sewer level. You can shoot through these levels quick, but killing zombie #56074 in a level that looks the same as when you killed #1 is somewhat upsetting. This game does really shine, however, in the unique sections. There is a boss at the end of the current additional content, who has a labrynth that is the same every time you go in, but it is totally enthralling and so well designed that it made me forget about trudging through thirty minutes of repetitive crap to get there.
They've also tried to change it up a bit with the quest line, and I'll list a few just so you get an idea. There is a capture the flag game VS NPC's, there a territory control game vs NPCs, there is a puzzle game vs NPCs, there is an RTS quest where you control some friendly NPCs and have them complete an objective for you. You also go into the brain of a friendly NPC to fight his imagination. All the time they never lose sight of the fact that this is an action-RPG, and the story and design styles take a backseat to the intense fighting. Which they completely succeded in.
All in all, if you like hacky slashy games, I would say it's safe to spend money on this now. They are hammering through the patches and aim to have more additional content out for June. I think it's very entertaining, especially to play with friends. It's one of those games you can play all day, or play for ten minutes before work.
I was fairly excited, I was intrigued to play a fast paced FPS/Third person melee with action-RPG elements. IE, hordes of baddies vs not very many players. What I got was one of the most broken games I've ever actually spent money on. I mean, I would have been upset if this was a BETA. The party functions were broken, enemies were glitching, the quests were bugged, and there was one point in the main quest where you could NOT continue because the quest triggers were incorrect. The classes were imbalanced, talents were broken, and many of the talents made little to no sense. So, after struggling through approximately fifteen playtime hours and beating the game on the first difficulty, we put the game in a dark corner to think about what it had done to us. I'm glad I didn't spend any money on a subscription for it.
And here I am, dusting it off again for the first time since then. I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Many MMOs look nothing now like they did in 1.0, so what the hay right? It's now in 1.45 and they've had plenty of time to clean their act up, so I went balls to the walls straight away and subscribed. What I got now was a completely different experience from the first time. Quests were smooth, (most) enemies were de-glitched. The party functions actually worked correctly inside the instances. A few of the classes have even been overhauled, and they are continuing to do so. They seem to have hauled ass to fix many of the errors that stopped the game from being enjoyable. So, now I can sit here and properly review the game, now that it is actually a game.
I'm going to come straight out now and say that to me, the melee classes in this game are terribly boring to play. They are exciting for about an hour, but there is no combo building, or any sort of strategy really. It just doesn't feel natural and fast paced. You run in, use the same skills every time in the same order, and you can pretty much just play with one hand while you use the other to keep your scrotum warm on those snowy Canadian winter days. As of now, there is a tanking-ish melee class, and a dual wielding beserker style hack and slasher. While the tanking class is very effective at that job (now that they fixed taunting) it is incredibly boring to play. I have to staple my eyeballs open while I just taunt, then smash them with my sheild, then taunt again, etc. Sounds exciting, but most of the benefits of this class come from passive auras that you have no control over. The blademaster (barbarian) was a little more interesting to play, and the talent trees gave you a few different options for build and playstyle, but it was still ultimately button mashing. This game is definately running off of the theory "You only have to make 10 minutes of gameplay and then repeat, it, so that 10 minutes has to be fun". Melee, was not fun.
Ranged is where this game shines. There are two pure ranged classes, the Marksman and the Evoker. The Evoker is essentially a mage, and the Marksman is Master Chief. Since the idea is to stay far away, advancing melee NPCs force you to strategize and move constantly to stay alive on the harder difficulties. To me, this is far more interesting and more importantly, intensly fun. In the endgame content, you are rarely sitting comfortable in your chair when playing these classes. My back usually hurts after two hours from hunching over my keyboard with my abs flexed. My fingers spider all over the hotkeys and movement controls like I'm playing Slayer on GH3.
There are also two "pet classes". The engineer and the Summoner. They are essentially watered down versions of their "pure" counterparts (Marksman -> Engineer and Evoker -> Summoner), only retaining a few of the skills and the rest are replaced with summoning talents. They have the usual, tanking pet, damage pets, pets that put debuffs on the enemies. I personally didn't find them that fun to play, but they were not boring. Just not as intense since your posse does most of the work for you.
Enough about this, lets talk about some of the other mechanics. They had some real geniuses working on this game, and as many shortcomings as it has, it also has a few brilliant concepts. When you are in a party, and you are killing enemies, everyone gets their own loot. Get that? Everyone has their own loot (but also not identical to the other party members). This removes one of my major gripes about some multiplayer games, spending hours on an instance or boss, just to lose a great item to someone else. You can also dismantle loot, and use the components to upgrade your items, or craft new items entirely. The special effects in this games, such as getting set on fire and shocked with electricity, are very complex and it adds another layer of strategy when fighting enemies. For example, if you are fighting a particular mob that has a nasty move, you can use electric weapons or talents to try and bypass his elemental defense and "shock" him, which prevents him from using special talents. This forces the player to carry many weapon setups for different situations, and change talents to adjust the strength and length of these "special effects". Get it? Got it? Good!
I almost forgot to mention this. It is almost impossible to look like anyone else in the game. There is some sort of random generator that adds all your gears' looks together, and gives you a unique color and texture. For example, in my gear right now I am wearing white armour with a dark orange undersuit. If I change my pants, I will go to a gunmetal armour color with a blue undersuit and a lighting system on the back of my nanosuit. Neat? Yes.
Now onto the level design. For the first half of the game, there is literally just three or four layouts for levels. One of the big points they talked about with this game was the random level generation in instances. Unfortunately, they spent so much time doing this that until you get further into additional content, you are pretty much stuck with these levels: Random subway system, random city street, and random sewer level. You can shoot through these levels quick, but killing zombie #56074 in a level that looks the same as when you killed #1 is somewhat upsetting. This game does really shine, however, in the unique sections. There is a boss at the end of the current additional content, who has a labrynth that is the same every time you go in, but it is totally enthralling and so well designed that it made me forget about trudging through thirty minutes of repetitive crap to get there.
They've also tried to change it up a bit with the quest line, and I'll list a few just so you get an idea. There is a capture the flag game VS NPC's, there a territory control game vs NPCs, there is a puzzle game vs NPCs, there is an RTS quest where you control some friendly NPCs and have them complete an objective for you. You also go into the brain of a friendly NPC to fight his imagination. All the time they never lose sight of the fact that this is an action-RPG, and the story and design styles take a backseat to the intense fighting. Which they completely succeded in.
All in all, if you like hacky slashy games, I would say it's safe to spend money on this now. They are hammering through the patches and aim to have more additional content out for June. I think it's very entertaining, especially to play with friends. It's one of those games you can play all day, or play for ten minutes before work.
